Maps on Purpose

Maps on Purpose was a city-wide community art project organized by Art on Purpose, a non-profit arts organization in Baltimore, in partnership with the Walters Art Museum and other sponsors. The project, which included over 20 Baltimore neighborhoods, combined art and map-making in intergenerational workshops for eight weeks in the fall of 2007. Each workshop group produced artistic maps of their communities, each highlighting issues, concerns, places of interest, histories, resources, and other information about their neighborhoods. The workshops culminated in exhibitions in each participating neighborhood, and then the maps went on display at several locations in the spring of 2008, including the Walters Art Museum.

Remington was one of the participating neighborhoods in the project, and our workshop involved adults and youth from the neighborhood along with students at the Greenmount School. We worked in Remington for eight weeks creating maps of where we walk in the neighborhood. The maps were displayed at the GreenMount School in November of 2007 and then again in several exhibitions in the spring of 2008, including the Walters Art Museum and the School 33 Art Center. We titled our project “Where We Walk and Why.” The concept of our maps was tracking walking routes in the neighborhood and determining how we can get more residents to spend more time outside walking the neighborhood. The goal of getting more people to walk is to get people to meet each other and increase public safety.

Where We Walk and Why

Where do the youth in Remington spend their time? What opportunities are there for young people in Remington to play, eat, learn, or socialize?

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These are two of the main questions we hoped to answer by making these maps. We wanted to discover what resources we have in the neighborhood by pinpointing the destinations that people walk to in their daily lives. We wanted to discover the “points of interest” that exist in our community and how, if at all, they are being utilized by its residents – especially the youth.

String Map
Through this mapping process we discovered that the most frequented destinations by youth are commercial businesses. This pattern is telling for two reasons. First, it suggests that there is a lack of alternative destinations in the neighborhood, such as after-school programs, a boys and girls club, a skate park, etc. With little variety in destinations for youth, their options for productive use of their after-school time are limited. Second, we found that among these frequented businesses are a bar, a fast-food corporate restaurant, and a chain convenient store. What’s missing from this “menu” of food providers are local businesses that carry healthy yet still-affordable items. Burger King, for example, is the only sit-down restaurant in the neighborhood (not counting the bars) that kids go to on a consistent basis.

This information is most observable on the “string map,” which shows the number and kind of walks taken by each participant to the list of destinations they identified. Note the number of blue strings representing “business / retail” walks.

Collage Map
In addition to showing the places that we frequent, the map also serves to highlight places that we avoid, have no interest in, or don’t know about. We discovered that there are a handful of locations in Remington that are being underutilized by its residents for these and other reasons. The map includes these points as places that have the potential to become viable destinations for youth and adults in the neighborhood; as such they are labeled as “opportunity stops,” or places that are currently underutilized but could become assets or resources in the near future. It is important to note that 2 of these opportunity stops, a green space on Huntingdon Avenue, and an abandoned park on 28th and Fox Streets, exist along routes that are well-traveled by both youth and adults. These two locations in particular are deserving of attention since they could potentially serve a great number of Remington residents.

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This information is represented on the walking route map with collaged destination points. Unlike the string map, each line here does not represent an individual walk. Instead, this map should be read almost as if the routes are lines on a metro system; each colored line shows the usage of the designated path, which could be traveled by any number of residents. The patterns that emerge here show the main routes traveled by the participants (from the Greenmount School down Huntingdon Avenue). Note how the opportunity stops mentioned above exist along well-traveled routes on the map.